99% Invisible has been going for 15 years! I’ve been listening to it since 2015, not quite from the beginning, but quite a long time, and it’s undoubtedly one of the favourite things I listen to or watch.
To celebrate the anniversary, they did a special episode where Roman Mars answers 15 questions from listeners and staff. The answers are all good, but one of them really stood out for me, and I love it. The segment starts about 17:06 minutes in. I’ve transcribed (and lightly edited) the key part of Roman’s answer here. Producer Vivian Le asks, “What’s a design-related hill you’re willing to die on?”
The march to make things more and more efficient makes the world a worse place. I think of this in terms of advertising. The idea that we were going to efficiently measure how effective advertising was through clicks and eyeballs and stuff erased all of the extra money that made all of the journalism and all the pop culture that you cared about in the twentieth century. It made it all possible.
The inefficiency of the advertising system made everything good in this world. I think that the idea that you’re trying to get things to be as efficient as possible is actually a terrible, world-destroying idea. The most efficient restaurant is a ghost kitchen that has no storefront. Because that’s inefficient, because it could be empty sometimes! It’s a ghost kitchen that just ships you a thing, and has an underpaid delivery person that brings it to your door, and you never leave. And this is stripping away all the goodness of the world and of cities.
I think efficiency is absolute garbage. And that is the design-related hill I’m willing to die on. I feel like you should be always allowing for great deals of inefficiency to make a nice-designed city, a nice-designed system and make it work. I really hate the focus on efficiency. Not only does it destroy all these good things, it takes money and gives it to the worst people. Like the platform creators and the tech people, instead of… change and tips and things. It’s not like things are cheaper, or things are better. Just, money is being transferred to the wrong people instead of creators and people who make the world a better place through community and creation.
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You need friction, you need the space of creation. That open freedom of an inefficient system where money sloshes around inside of it. These frictions and inefficiencies are what make everything good about the world. So if you can handle that big abstraction, that is the design-related hill I’m willing to die on.